The most famous page in the whole Prelude comes midway in Book I, where the young oarsman-poet takes “A little boat tied to a willow tree / Within a rocky cove…” and admits “It was an act of stealth.” As he rows out, fixing his eye on a craggy ridge to the rear, “a huge peak, black and huge…Upreared its head…” For many days he felt that spectacle, “Of unknown modes of being,” of the power behind, within Nature, quite beyond “the mean and vulgar works of man.” And might I add, no Englishman can know “mean and vulgar works” equal to American malls or what Russians Ilf and Petrov called in the 50’s, “one-storied America.”īehind the poem also lies social reform, when seeing a "hunger-bitten girl" tied to a heifer, "that poverty / Abject as this would in a little while / Be found no more"(Bk IX). Like Rousseau’s Confessions, this poet’s whole project illustrates his line, “The child is father of the man,” which becomes Freud’s analysis a century later. Thus pride of strength,/ And the vain-glory of superior skill, were tempered.”**(Book II).īefore finding his epic subject of self-development, the poet searches “some old / Romantic tale by Milton left unsung / More often turning to some gentle place /Within the groves of Chivalry.” Or, “How Mithridates northward passed…” or “some high-souled man,/ Unnamed among the chronicles of kings, / Suffered in silence for Truth’s sake….” At Scottish home fires, and in Wordsworth’s childhood two centuries ago, “we pursued / Our home amusements by the warm peat-fire.” (Book I, end) Also as in Beaton, rural labor teaches ethics that the city may not here, young Wordy* rows, races against his fellows on a lake toward an island with the remains of a chapel “In such a race/ So ended, disappointment could be none,/…We rested in the shade, all pleased alike, / Conquered and conqueror. Beaton mysteries: unexpectedly linked by fuel.
First read over a half-century ago, but chosen now by chance after two M.C.
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